These German historians would to like follow orders!

November 8, 2011 5:29 PM

I'm writing a paper that involves reading forty articles by about thirty different historians. Their biographical details are relevant. I'd like to be able to enter information about these articles and their authors into a database (or something similar) and then be able to sort by the various categories, link entries together, easily have lists of all of the people or articles who fit a given criterium, et cetera. What should I use? Free or cheap, OSX-compatible, relatively low learning curve.
posted by naturalog to Technology (6 answers total)

Response by poster: Also, I use EndNote for citations already, so if there's some way I can make EndNote work for this, that would also be an option. (I don't think there is one.)
posted by naturalog at 5:29 PM on November 8, 2011

Ooh, Endnote does have 5 or 6 customizable fields that may help. Depends on just how much cross-referencing you need. But when I was using Endnote for my thesis, I entered keywords from my personal filing system into one of the custom fields, and that saved my bacon a bunch of times. You'd be able to sort alphabetically by any of the custom fields, and if you have a good organizational system you can probably fit several subtopics into those fields.
posted by tchemgrrl at 5:54 PM on November 8, 2011

Endnote can do it. I bet your college library has an Endnote guru working there.
posted by twblalock at 7:27 PM on November 8, 2011

Zotero might be a free option.
posted by webhund at 7:40 PM on November 8, 2011

If you can make EndNote's custom fields work for you then I would go with that. Otherwise, a personal database program (Bento, maybe?) might be useful for you.
posted by FrereKhan at 2:17 AM on November 9, 2011

Mendeley is pretty good for stuff like this.
posted by eleanna at 1:43 PM on November 9, 2011